Extravagant armour and tail weaponry on Spicomellus afer fossil confound existing theories of how the species evolved
Tank-like physique, bristling with body armour and a collar of spikes the length of golf clubs, Spicomellus afer looks more like a Pokémon creation than a living creature. This bizarre dinosaur roamed the flood plains of what is now north Africa 165m years ago, palaeontologists have revealed.
The fossil, the oldest known ankylosaur specimen, was unearthed near the central Moroccan town of Boulemane. Its extravagant armour has confounded existing theories of how the ankylosaurs, a major group of plant-eating dinosaurs, evolved.
“It’s absolutely bristling with spikes all over its body,” said Prof Richard Butler, of the University of Birmingham and the project co-lead. “It has these incredibly distinctive spikes around the neck – an armoured collar that is absolutely enormous and totally out of proportion to the rest of the body, smaller spikes projecting out of the ribs, and at the end of its tail it would have had some kind of weapon.”
The dinosaur’s anatomy was so outlandish that piecing together the body plan from the incomplete jumble of fossilised bones was not an easy task.
